The emergence of mobile devices has created keen interest amongst non volatile semiconductor memory manufacturers to increase the densities of their devices. Generally, mobile devices do not make use of disk drives in favor of semiconductor based non volatile storage devices. Historically, however, semiconductor storage devices do not have the same storage density as disk drives.
In order to bring the storage densities of semiconductor memories closer to or beyond disk drives, non volatile memory device manufacturers are developing three dimensional memory technologies. In the case of three dimensional memory technologies, individual storage cells are vertically stacked on top of another within the storage device. Three dimensional memory devices may therefore provide a mobile device with disk drive like storage density in a much smaller package, cost and power consumption envelope. However, the manufacture of three dimensional memory devices raises new manufacturing technology challenges.